Pfsense – With out doubt a very good software firewall

“I had been reviewing pfsense firewall recently. After using an outdated Watchguard firebox for long, we wanted to replace it with something reliable and easy to manage remotely. Previously our NOC team was looking at Endian for a lot of customers but it ended up as a wrong choice of technology with many of the stuff not working as expected and some of the crucial features missing or not working no matter repeated attempts.

Installation of Pfsense is straight forward but can be a little confusing for a novice user especially assigning the WAN and LAN interfaces. But there are lots of step by step installation videos in youtube to rescue. Once you have got the web based GUI, then configuring everything is a breeze. I liked the PPTP feature which many of the s/w firewalls were missing.

Since we liked it a lot we are moving our internal office n/w also under pfsense which means ‘RIP’ for the pretty old watchguard or serve me at my home.”

pfSense is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router. In addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, it includes a long list of related features and a package system allowing further expandability without adding bloat and potential security vulnerabilities to the base distribution.

Chris Buechler has created a list of pfSense 2.0 New Features and Changes.

A work in progress list of 2.0 new features and changes is available. I think that has most of the changes, but it’s definitely missing some. If you notice anything that was missed, please leave a comment. We’ll be adding to it as we review the list more in the coming days. (source)